Untold Magazine has been around campus for quite some time; however, it has seen some major changes. 

Untold magazine was seen almost as a lifestyle magazine akin to publications like GQ and Vanity Fair but for college students, and the Untold team started to shift more into a more diverse selection of pieces in recent years. 

The Oracle was able to sit down with Max Ridenour who is part of class of 2024, and a Graphic designer for the Untold team. They were able to talk to the Oracle about what’s upcoming, what’s changed for the team and also what to expect for the upcoming fall issue. 

Untold is described as a magazine that “tackles the underground and under-discussed at Hamline.” The magazine is one of many student-led artistic publications on campus that rely on submissions from the student body for content. 

The type of submissions can range from written word pieces such as poems, short stories or interviews, or even all the way to digital arts. While the magazine publishes twice a year, one for fall semester and one for spring semester, the team is always finding ways to switch up the type of content they produce. 

Ridenour was able to talk about some of the changes and challenges the team are facing overall. 

Last year, Untold faced the challenges of understaffing and losing a good chunk of their team to seniors graduating. This year, they are mostly still intact, only losing a couple of positions. Because of this, the team is able to focus on rearranging the structure of who is doing what on the team. 

For example, in 2021 Ridenour was the team’s lead creative designer and felt major amounts of responsibility and challenges especially when it came in hand with school deadlines. This year Ridenour is still a part of the team in an equally important role but is able to delegate work so their deadlines don’t have such a short time between each other.

One of the many elements that differentiates Untold magazine from other student art publications at Hamline is their ability to use their online website. They use this site hand in hand with their physical publication. 

The physical publication of Untold Magazine has an overarching theme, organized to fit with other submissions and pieces. All submissions follow a one word theme, if any submissions do not fit with the theme as a whole it’s a lot more likely to be put on the website instead of being turned down altogether. 

“The team overall focuses on keeping things as open ended as possible for people,” Ridenour said.

Their website also allows this philosophy to be seen by allowing for so many different forms of media to be published. 

This year, Ridenour mentioned that there were a lot more pitches than last year. This pushes the team more towards the website for a multitude of reasons, one of them being the structure and format of the magazine itself along with possible pitches clashing with others in the drafts for the print layout. 

One of the elements Ridenour really wanted to make clear is that “Untold Focuses on the underground of Hamline’s artistic community.” To the team the most important element is that the underground is truly the main focus. They were impressed with the increase in not just the pitches, but the diversity of the submissions, to lean Untold in a mixed media direction that will go hand in hand with changes to the website overall. Overall Untold will most likely be less “2-D stationary based,” than former years and will continue to trend into the underground.

Untold magazine recently closed off pitch submissions and has reached out to the majority of artists who are accepted. These artists will use most of October to work on their pitches with their final drafts being due around the end of October. 

Once all the pitches are finalized the team will spend most of November working and designing the fall issue, rolling out the issue a bit before Thanksgiving break, expect both magazine and their website to have some of the finest pieces Hamline has to offer. The Untold website can be found at hamlineuntold.com.